Redistributing Power: Land Reform, Rural Cooptation, and Grassroots Regime Institutions in Authoritarian Taiwan

Abstract

Can redistributive policies such as land reform help authoritarian regimes coopt rural societies? Given that land reform has the potential to disrupt preexisting sociopolitical orders, this article highlights an unresolved puzzle of how regimes balance between the objectives of expanding its rural coalitional support through transformative redistribution and stabilizing its political control over rural institutions during land reform. Using a novel dataset of Taiwan’s 1950s rural reforms under the Kuomintang authoritarian regime, I find that stronger redistributive effects facilitated cooptation of new land reform beneficiaries through a key institution – the farmers’ association (FA). However, I also find that the restructuring of rank-and-file FA membership was still subject to meddling by the native landlord class. I thus argue that land reform, while allowing regimes to broaden their rural coalitions through socioeconomic redistribution, can also paradoxically compel regimes to concede power during institutional cooptation.